Archeological findings
during the first half of the 20th century in the American West
fostered a notion that the first people were predominantly big game hunters
roaming the prairies in search of prey. Unfortunately, this interpretation,
grafted onto the rest of the continent, skewed ideas of when the newcomers
arrived, what route they took, and whether they wiped out large mammals
like mastodons. New finds and techniques could clarify these issues.
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No
site in the Northeast has yielded evidence of the dramatic herd-kills
that point to big game hunting. Certainly humans were a major new predator
on the scene, which is affirmed by burned animal bone found at some sites.
But discoveries of charred nutshells and fish bones at Pennsylvania’s
Shawnee-Minisink site suggest that people in the region were flexible
about how they got their food.

Small animals—birds,
rabbits, fish, turtles—were likely essential to survival, along with
edible plants. Deer, moose, and elk were available, as were caribou,
though not in big herds. There is no clear evidence of Paleoindians
hunting large animals like the mammoth in the region. next
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In
the Southeast, large Ice Age mammals were present, but archeologists
aren’t certain if hunters wiped them out. In Florida’s Waucissa River,
the skull of an extinct bison was found with a stone point broken off
in its forehead. A giant land tortoise, apparently speared with a stake,
was also discovered in the Southeast.

Other animal remains,
including mammoth bones with butchering marks, have been found too.
The evidence suggests that people gradually abandoned a toolkit geared
to large game hunting. Had they given up on a dwindling resource?

The region offered many
paths to survival, with a range of plants and animals to be had. next
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Though
mastodons were abundant in the early Midwest, little evidence links
them to humans (except at the Kimmswick site near St. Louis). Michael
Shott, an archeologist at the University of Northern Iowa, says proof
may be elusive because “acid soils do horrible things to bones.”

At one point in the era,
the climate suddenly became severely cold and dry, temporarily halting
the glacial retreat. This reordered the plant world, which proved to
be bad news for large-bodied, narrowly adapted mammals like the mammoth.
“Instead of inquiring whether people extinguished them,” Shott says,
“we may easily wonder how they persisted so long.” <<
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